Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy, and: Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson (review)

In Bridge, to finesse means to draw your opponent's card into play at a moment when its power to do damage can be neutralized. Louis Renza likes the word finesse, and he sees Wallace Stevens, in particular, playing a deep hand. In "The Plot against the Giant," for example, Renza understands the Whitmanian echo as "a reference to a poetic mode identified with a certain type of literary public expectation that Stevens attempts to finesse rather than deny" (243). The Stevens of Harmonium—and Renza focuses exclusively on this first book—is an intensely, and idiosyncratically, private poet, fashioning obscurely beautiful lyrics that incite, and elude, interpretive capture. Renza is perfectly happy to be thus finessed by Stevens, and he offers some wonderfully inventive readings of poems and clusters in Harmonium, only to assert that there remains a "private yield" (214) for the poet alone, most often an encryption of a radically self-referential "scene of writing." Thus, after having seduced libidinous subtexts from "The Emperor of Ice Cream" or "The Load of Sugar-Cane," Renza seems content to pronounce that "[s]ex primarily serves Stevens as a trope to instantiate his poem's private scene of writing. Its vulgarity consists of an entirely privatized fantasy. . . . He would bar absolutely—as by imperial fiat—anyone bent on intimate knowledge of his work" (179).

Whether something like an "entirely privatized fantasy" can be said to exist is a live question for Renza, who in any case shares with his subjects a wish that it might. The public-private conceptual dyad is employed throughout the book, sometimes fleshed out with more or less familiar social content, at other times determining an abstract psychological conflict, but in the end it would seem that Poe, Stevens, and Renza all reach for a moment exceeding the dichotomy altogether—"a nanosecond in compositional time" in which an author "can refrain from considering the poem's accretion of public meanings" (200). This is an important point for Renza: to imagine and create without reference to the public-private dyad means perforce that the privacy being assumed is not, or not only, a reaction and defense against public tyranny: "Stevens differentiates a poetics of privacy from an isolationist mind-set" (144), even if he imagines the latter in poems like "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon."

Renza's emphasis on "compositional time" and the "scene of writing" is meant to draw our attention to how thoroughly metapoetic both Poe and Stevens are. From this vantage, then, pairing Stevens with Poe (Renza admits it is not a standard couple, though he does well in discovering Bloomian precursor texts and figures from Poe in Harmonium) gives us a slyer, more hoaxy, Stevens than usual. But if Stevens's privacy is prelusive (the nanosecond before), Poe's is post-apocalyptic. In Eureka, Renza argues, we find Poe's negation of the public-private dyad, as the universal implosion sucks everything, including Poe's ambition, into the indifference, both physical and psychological, of "matter no more." Many years ago, Renza published "Poe's Secret Autobiography," an essay many Poe scholars consider a touchstone, and its argument has been incorporated and expanded in the present book. Thus we have Poe's insistent "emplotment" of his tales' misreadings (39), or his anagramizing of his signature into titles and figures (Siope = is Poe) with little hope of discovery, and no other point than discovery. Poe's metapoetics, unlike Stevens's, is strictly self-consuming, as with the final lines of "The Fall of the House of Usher," where Poe signals, by his quotation marks, that it is also the tale...